Archives

Month: July 2015

Today I worked a bit more to implement some more game mechanics. Most significant addition is that Gnomes can now take damage from enviroment. In this level, if they step on the lava, it burns and then kills the poor gnome, sending his soul to the gnomish heaven. I’m too tired to post a video, but hopefully soon.

Changelog for v0.05:

Tile-aware collision to the gnomes so that they can interact with enviroment. i.e. Lava burns.

Tweaked the first level to make it less boring

Added some effects for burning of lava and angelic gnome (a.k.a dead gnome)

So the game is shaping up. Inspired by this post on reddit, I added some Lemmings-like objective to the scene. Now in overall, you try to lead the poor gnomes to the safety by shaping the world with your “godly” powers. I’m not sure who are we playing actually, an old gnome-god or an all powerful gnome-wizard?

If there is anything you want to see in the game, feel free to comment 🙂

Today I added basic movement for our gnomes. They interact with the world, jumping over the grains and moving around. I also added a spawning door and an exit door to the scene. It actually is fun to play with. The addition of chracters to the game really increases the fun compared to a plain sandbox.

Here is a short gameplay video with a nice celtic music. In the next post, I’m planning to add an actual browser-playable version.

It’s really helpful to make prototyping before actually starting to polish and optimize. A hard to learn lesson but of utmost importance for gamedev (yes, I’m feeling poetic).

Anyways, playing around with Graina, I noticed that it’s, erm, boring. Yes you have the sands and water and lava and other stuff but it becomes boring after a few minutes of play. Maybe this is the reason that the original game (Falling Sands) never made it big, like for example minecraft, I don’t know.

Now after a few hours of coding, I added a controlable character to the scene. I’ll either make smt. like a sandbox-platformer or smt.like sandbox Lemmings. And here are some screen shots (Couldn’t made a decent video on my MacBook Air, any tips?)

First we have the proverbial sandbox, then add some sand, some water and some guys. I managed to use the particles as a collision map thanks to the great impact engine I’m using easily. What I have is now running and jumping fellas in a completely dynamic particle-based are.

As with my new motto “no to graphics” I already begun fiddling with falling sands type game. The basic mechanics are not so hard, like making the sand fall and water to flow etc. To make the motion more realistic, I had to make a lot of tricks and hacks. By the way, it’s purely in Javascript and what you see in the video is a direct shot from the browser window. The speed is quite impressive, taking into account that the code is running in the browser.